Archive for the 'People' Category

Jack Kissell, 1930-2009

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Hugo Schwyzer
on November 19, 2009
in Addiction and mental illness and People
. 0 Comments

I read this morning of the death of Jack Kissell, a legendary figure in Southern California recovery circles, and my “sponsor” (on and off) for many years during the 1990s and the beginning of this decade.

Alcoholics Anonymous and the legion of Twelve Step programs that sprang forth from it have always insisted on, as the name implies, anonymity for its members. (In my writing, I’ve danced very close to the edge of “outing” myself, of course, but on this blog claim no membership in any particular organization.) For years, it has generally been understood that the anonymity requirement ended with death; it is common in public obituaries to note a long-standing period of sobriety in AA or other groups. Jack, who died at 79, died with 38 years sober.

In my recovery, I’ve had many sponsors. Two have stood out: my friend Jenia B., a woman just four years my senior but with (today) over a quarter century of sobriety who brought me into the heart of what is often called “the program”, and Jack Kissell, who took me through the twelve steps with insight and humor and Irish relentlessness. Jack sponsored hundreds of men and women around the country, and how he found time to talk so intimately and warmly with each is simply miraculous. For years, he and his beloved Jean lived in an apartment near the water in Redondo Beach. Time and again, I drove down to see him, to “read him my inventory” or talk about a specific problem. We always finished our conversations by moving from a discussion of sobriety to Jack’s second-favorite topic, Notre Dame football. I saw him on the stage many times in productions across Los Angeles; he was a delightful character actor who could, like so many sober alcoholics, perform both menace and vulnerability with ease.

I’ve referred to Jack before on this blog, never by his full name. It was Jack who taught me to “do the NEXT right thing”, who taught me what fidelity really looked like, and who gave me - at least for a short time — the gift of celibacy. And it was Jack who first taught me these lines:

If you want what you’ve never had, you have to become what you’ve never been. To become what you’ve never been, you’re gonna have to do what you’ve never done.

It is not the melodrama of a eulogy that leads me to note that I might very well not be alive without his wisdom, his kindness, and his love. Jack Kissell and I hadn’t spoken since 2000, after a foolish falling-out. (The fault was entirely mine, and I confess I held a entirely unjustified resentment against Jack for a long time.) I always meant to call him again, and never made the time. I am glad that while he was my sponsor, I was able to express my profound gratitude for his loving presence in my life, and glad that I am now able to give public credit where credit is due. I know that many folks have found comfort in things I’ve said or written that I learned from Jack, and they ought to know his full name.

We’re all on a journey, going through a process, and it would be far more lonely and far more terrifying without the wisdom of those just a bit further down the road. Jack’s gone farther along now, to the other country, and in due course, all whom he loved and sponsored will follow him there. But the good he did — for he was a very, very good man — will last, kept alive by the many he taught who will, over and over again, repeat his insights.

Marilyn French, 1929-2009: UPDATED

Published
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Hugo Schwyzer
on May 05, 2009
in Books, Feminism and People
. 3 Comments

The great Marilyn French has died at 79. Many appreciations are appearing this week, see here for more.

Marilyn French is best known for her wonderful — if now dated — The Women’s Room. It’s perhaps the most important novel to come out of what is commonly known as Second Wave Feminism, and it remains a vital, fascinating, at times infuriating text. In 1986, when I was first beginning to think about doing women’s studies and feminist work, a friend of mine recommended the book to me. “Read it”, she said, “and tell me what you think.” I read the book the fall semester of my sophomore year, and was galvanized by it. Much has been made in the obituaries of French’s anger, and there’s little doubt that in many respects “The Women’s Room” is an angry novel. But righteous anger in the face of blind privilege, reckless entitlement, and crushing social norms is no vice — and I found French’s work to be a powerful and damning indictment. At 19, I recognized aspects of myself in some of her less sympathetic male characters — and in no small way, the book contributed to the beginning of my intellectual journey to (at least attempt to) become a different sort of man.

I also loved her Beyond Power, now out of print. One of the first organized discussions of feminism in which I ever participated (if we don’t count sitting quietly in the room while my mother hosted meetings of the League of Women Voters) came in late ‘86, and the topic was French’s then brand-new and dazzling meditation on patriarchy, resistance, and sexuality over the entire course of human history. Most of my younger feminist colleagues who’ve read the book tend to roll eyes or snort derisively when I talk almost worshipfully of French; for some, she’s the very epitome of a certain kind of privileged Second Waver, the sort whose feminism is often alienating to those born long after Watergate. But it’s still on my shelf, and it’s still a terrific text. It’s influenced more than a little of my teaching.

I confess that “The Women’s Room” and “Beyond Power” are the only two Marilyn French works I’ve read. But like most of the books which have served me well, I take great pleasure in re-reading them. I’ll track down some of her more recent novels soon, and urge those who have never read her work to start with her most important and influential offerings.

UPDATE: Jha has a great tribute here.

Father Joseph Martin, 1924-2009

Published
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Hugo Schwyzer
on March 16, 2009
in Addiction and mental illness, Father and People
. 0 Comments

Today would be my father’s 74th birthday. He’s been gone almost three years, and I think about him almost every day. That he never got to hold his granddaughter Heloise Cerys Raquel is a source of great sadness; the hope that I have that he sees her now is a great comfort. And most importantly, I pray that the gentleness he bequeathed to me comes through my words and my fingertips when I hold my baby girl.

Today I note the passing, too, of an influential figure in my recovery from addiction. Many an alcoholic or addict who went through treatment in the ’80s or ’90s will recognize the name “Father Martin”. Joseph Martin’s “chalk talks” about alcoholism, depression, and anger were marvelously insightful and comforting. His common-sense approach to the disease of alcoholism (and I remain a passionate adherent of the disease model) continues to shape how I think about my sobriety, though I haven’t seen any of his tapes in over a decade. Along with John Bradshaw and Leo Buscaglia, Father Martin was one of those popular (and often amateur) psychologists whose writing and whose VHS tapes were script and soundtrack for my recovery. Joe Martin saved a lot of lives, and made a lot of lives better. May there be joy and laughter as he comes to the far side of the Jordan.

Richard John Neuhaus, 1936-2009

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 08, 2009
in Faith, People and Writing
. 2 Comments

Father Richard John Neuhaus died this morning at the age of 72, following a long battle with complications from cancer.

Neuhaus was the founder, editor, and publisher of First Things, the flagship journal for Catholic neo-conservatism, and the only right-of-center magazine to which I have ever regularly subscribed. Neuhaus, a former Lutheran pastor who converted to Rome and was ordained as a priest, was an extraordinary writer. It was the quality of his prose that drew me to him many years ago, when my friend Steve gave me a copy of the wonderful Death on a Friday Afternoon. Steve was — and is — a strong evangelical conservative with latent Catholic tendencies, and he hoped to bring me “over to the dark side” by playing on my fondness for first-rate writing. “Death on a Friday Afternoon” is a book I have returned to again and again in recent Lents, and though I am too progressive in my politics to have much taste for most atonement theories, Neuhaus’ case for the efficaciousness of Christ’s suffering on the cross is as good as any I’ve read. (And I’ve read a lot on atonement theory, having worked on the subject for a year or two in graduate school.)

Neuhaus was a vigorous defender of the idea that faith was vital to how we participated in the struggle for the common good, a point he made in his earlier and very influential The Naked Public Square. His greatest wrath was reserved for those who tried to excise religious motivations from political discussions. He ridiculed the idea that any serious believer (be he or she Christian or Muslim or Jewish or Hindu or what-have-you) could so compartmentalize his or her life so that politics and faith had no influence upon each other. Our faith, Neuhaus reminded his readers again and again, shapes our world view — and we participate in public life based upon that world view. Respect and tolerance had their place (and Neuhaus proved it by having friends across the ideological and theological spectrum, including, famously, the radical Methodist Stanley Hauerwas), but respect and tolerance did not preclude the obligation to bring one’s own most deeply held convictions into the political sphere. Father Neuhaus was an influence on many important conservative Catholic voices, and was, without question, the priest closest to the upper echelons of the Bush Administration. George W. Bush called him simply “Father Richard”.

Neuhaus, partnering with Chuck Colson of Watergate fame, was a linchpin of the movement known as Evangelicals and Catholics Together. A former Protestant, Neuhaus retained deep and abiding affection and respect for those churches not in communion with Rome. A keen culture warrior, Neuhaus was eager to overcome decades of distrust and hostility between conservative Catholics and right-wing Protestants. Some of his motive was political: American conservatism needed unity rather than division in the struggle against liberalism. Some of his motive was theological: like most serious Christians, the divisions in the body of Christ wounded and saddened him. ECT, as it is known, has been an important project, and has brought in moderates and progressives as well as traditionalists. In recent years, Neuhaus took an interest in Catholic-Mormon dialogue, and published several pieces in First Things sympathetic to the LDS movement. Continue reading ‘Richard John Neuhaus, 1936-2009′

Saluting Odetta, and some thoughts on a folk-music childhood

Published
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Hugo Schwyzer
on December 03, 2008
in Memories, Music, People and Politics
. 7 Comments

I was saddened to read last night of the death of Odetta, the legendary folk-singer whose deep voice inspired generations of activists and music fans alike. I am so sorry she did not fulfill her most recent ambition (to perform at Barack Obama’s inauguration), and thrilled that she lived long enough to see him elected president.

As soon as I saw the obituary on the New York Times web page, sounds and feelings from my childhood rushed into my head. I was, from my earliest memories, a folk-music baby. Though my father (an amateur cellist) loved classical music, my mother had fallen in love with folk as a student at Vassar in the late 1950s. Folk music in the 1950s was the music of the political and cultural Left; it was also experiencing a major rebirth thanks to the efforts of folks like Odetta, Pete Seeger, and others. It was the soundtrack for my mother’s young adult years, and growing up in the 1970s, I listened over and over again to the records she had collected in the late ’50s and early ’60s.

The Newport Folk Festivals of the early 1960s were extraordinarily important in American musical history. My mother had virtually all of the recordings of these live concerts on LPs. On these records, which she or I (or less often, my little brother) would put on on rainy afternoons, I heard Joan Baez, Pete Seeger (on his own and with the Weavers), Ian and Sylvia, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and the young — acoustic — Bob Dylan. What had been the soundtrack for my mother’s college and graduate school years became the soundtrack for my childhood.

My liberal politics were — and to some extent still are — inextricably linked to music. I have no musical ability myself, but like many children and teenagers, I found in music an opportunity to discover emotions and ideas that I could not have felt as deeply in any other way. If, like some of my conservative friends, I had been raised listening to the explicitly evangelical music of the likes of the Gaither family, I might have embraced a much more traditional world view as a child. As it was, I came of age on protest songs. I can sing from memory every verse of “Joe Hill”, of “We Shall Not Be Moved“, and “The Banks are Made of Marble.” And Odetta’s version of “Down by the Riverside” is my favorite call to pacifism I know. Continue reading ‘Saluting Odetta, and some thoughts on a folk-music childhood’

Edie Karas, 1921-2008

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 16, 2008
in Memories and People
. 1 Comment

One of the memorable figures of my childhood and youth, Edie Karas, has died. On the Monterey Peninsula where I was raised, Edie and her late husband Sam were institutions in the intersecting worlds of local politics, higher education, and the arts. Edie founded the Gentrain program at Monterey Peninsula College in which she and my mother taught for many years. In 1987, Edie co-led a tour of northern Italy which gave me my first chance to see the glories of Florence, Venice, and Milan. She was a dear friend; a remarkable woman and a devoted public servant, and I honor her legacy and her memory.

She came to our family Christmas party each December for more than thirty years. We will miss her very much this year.

Dean Barnett

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 27, 2008
in People
. 0 Comments

My goodness, the conservatives keep dying. I don’t mean to be rude or flip, but the rapidity with which the ranks of the right are being depleted by the reaper seems, well, a bit stunning. (I mentioned that here.) In any event, a conservative commentator whom I enjoyed, Dean Barnett, died today of complications from cystic fibrosis. He was a regular guest host on the Hugh Hewitt radio program, and I always liked listening to him when he filled in. Like Hewitt, Barnett was painfully, willfully, irretrievably reactionary in his politics; like Hewitt, he softened some of that troglodytism with humor and grace and thoughtfulness. He was wrong on the issues, but I suspect he died right with his God.

May his family be comforted by his memory, and by the promise that they will rejoice with him again, in another country.

Ronald Grace

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 16, 2008
in Mentoring and People
. 2 Comments

It’s always a shock when one discovers a familiar name on the list of those killed in a notorious tragedy. My wife learned only this morning that among the 26 killed in last Friday’s terrible Metrolink train crash was Ron Grace, her junior-high counselor and P.E. teacher. His obituary is here.

Mr. Grace, as she knew him, was a key figure in my wife’s early adolescent years. It was Mr. Grace, she told me today, who encouraged her to compete in the eighth-grade spelling bee; she won that bee. She has often remarked that that victory (which stunned her, but not Mr. Grace), gave her a shot of intellectual confidence that made a huge difference in the years that followed. Ron Grace was at the very beginning of his career as a mentor when he coached my wife on the athletic field and pushed her into the spelling contest. He died on Friday afternoon, on his way home, just 55 years old.

If you’ve got mentors, father figures, mother figures, old school counselors or beloved teachers who made a difference, let this be your encouragement to drop them a line. Now. No one, after all, knows the time or the hour when we are to be summoned home.

Stephanie Tubbs-Jones, 1949-2008

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 21, 2008
in Food, People, Politics and Veganism
. 0 Comments

I’m in Europe still, but breaking hiatus to express my great shock and sadness at the death yesterday of Ohio Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs-Jones. Tubbs-Jones died suddenly following a brain hemorrhage.

Stephanie Tubbs-Jones was a dedicated progressive, and was perhaps best known for her role in vigorously contesting the 2004 Ohio presidential election results. What was less well-known was her role as an animal activist and a crusader for healthier eating. We sat with her at the 2007 PCRM Gala, and she and my wife chatted at length about the role that a vegetarian diet could play in reducing obesity and heart disease rates in the African-American community. (I mentioned that talk in this post.) Though Tubbs-Jones was not a vegan like her next-door neighbor in the House, Dennis Kucinich, she was convinced that education about and access to a plant-based diet was a crucial component in saving lives, both animal and human.

I told her that I intended to come before a House committee someday, pleading for a nationwide ban on fur pelting. Tubbs-Jones smiled and told me she looked forward to it. I don’t know if I’ll ever testify before Congress, but I knew that I would have had a very friendly welcome if I had made it there under her watch. Ohio and the country have lost a devoted advocate for the poor, for women, and for the interconnectedness of healthy eating and justice for animals.

MBTI Update

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 25, 2008
in People
. 5 Comments

I posted a few weeks ago about how many of the folks in my life tested as ENFP on the Myers-Briggs personality inventory; I just checked the stats on my Facebook page, and of 64 of my friends who have taken the test and posted their results, 33 are ENFP and another 20 are NFs of one kind or another. I may be married to an ESTP, but don’t seem to have many as friends.

Weirdness…

ENFPs abounding

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 06, 2008
in People
. 34 Comments

On Facebook, there are many little applications one can add. I don’t add most of them, as they seem to clutter up the page. I did, however, add the “MyType” app, which allows you to take a short version of the Myers-Briggs personality test, and compare your score to your friends.

I’m a fairly consistent ENFP, though in my younger years, I was an ENFJ. When I’m feeling a bit low, I think I lean towards being an INFP. I’ve taken the Myers-Briggs test many times, clearly!

The studies say that ENFPs are only 2-3% of the population — but in the past few weeks, it’s turned out that about half of my friends on Facebook who take the test are also ENFPs. Some of these folks are those whom I “invited” to take the test, so they may have been influenced by my type — but it’s relatively difficult to “game” the test to control an outcome. The only possible conclusion, other than random coincidence, is that “like attracts like”, at least in friendship. It’s an interesting thing.

My wife is a strong ESTP, and we work very well together. We’re a very good combination at parties, and no doubt, we will someday be very entertaining (if not exhausting) parents for our children.

So, gentle readers, what’s your type? If you don’t know it, there are many some Myers-Briggs tests available online, but the real test — the most reliable one — is proprietary and tends to cost around $29. Or you can add Facebook and the MyType app.

A note on Blair’s conversion, and on missing Rome

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 26, 2007
in Christianity, Divorce, Faith and People
. 10 Comments

Like most who have followed the life and career of Tony Blair, I was not surprised in the least by his decision to be received into the Roman Catholic Church, a decision made formal in a private ceremony last week. Long-affiliated with the fine old Christian Socialist Movement, his theology seemed to have been moving towards Rome for some time. (When Blair’s son Leo was born in 2000, a number of years younger than his other children with his wife, Cherie, there were very public rumors that the couple did not practice any form of artificial birth control, in keeping with Catholic teaching.)

I’ve had mixed feelings about Tony Blair for years now. But I wish him well, of course, as he moves forward on his spiritual journey. A great many Englishmen and women before him have “returned to Rome” before him, and he goes in fine company.

A little bit of me — just a little — is envious. My own religious peregrination has been fitful and dramatic, but it started with a late adolescent conversion from the atheism of my parents to Roman Catholicism. I was baptized and confirmed at the 1988 Easter Vigil, where I took the confirmation name Thomas. For a brief time, I seriously considered the priesthood — so great was my enthusiasm for the Church. My first marriage was solemnized with a full mass at St Paul the Apostle in Westwood, one of the larger Catholic parishes in West Los Angeles. During the first year of that marriage, I was a regular and enthusiastic communicant.

It was the end of my first marriage that, for me, made staying a Catholic untenable. Though we agreed on little else during the divorce process, my first wife and I were committed to not seeking an annulment, despite pressure from some of her Catholic relatives to get one. What had been done might now be undone, but we weren’t going to deny it had been done in the first place! And with the divorce came the bar from the eucharist. No more wafer and wine made into bread and blood for me, at least not in the Roman style.

I drifted away from Christ for the next few years after that 1992 divorce. When I came back, it was as a Protestant of one kind or another: an Anabaptist, a non-denominational charismatic, an Episcopalian. But here’s the rub: often, whether I’m at a Mennonite, Episcopal, or evangelical worship service, I find myself feeling as if what I’m participating in is somehow incomplete. There are churches, and then there is The Church. And while all the churches are somehow part of the Body of Christ, there is still for me a sense that the truest Church is Roman. Though I very rarely attend Mass any more, I admit that I feel something when I do that I have not felt anywhere else — and I have worshipped in more than my share of elsewheres.

I’m blissful in my fourth marriage. The chances of reconciling with my first wife are zero. I would never dream of raising our future children in a church community that didn’t see their parents’ marriage as being as licit and good as any other. As I understand it, the price of being allowed to become a regular communicant in the Catholic church would mean leaving my wife — or enduring a chaste marriage for the rest of our lives. I’ve checked this out with a few of my friends who know their canon law: without an annulment of my first marriage, or without a commitment to chastity within my current one, I’m going to have a hard time gettin’ to the communion rail. That price is much too high to pay.

It’s odd — I was a Mass-going Catholic for less than five years. That’s not even an eighth of my life. And yet Rome has a hold on me that nothing else has. And when I see the once-married Tony Blair received into the Church, my happiness for him is not untinged with envy.

Losing my first action hero

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 30, 2007
in Memories and People
. 6 Comments

Evel Knievel has died. I was seven when he hit the apex of his fame, trying to jump Snake River Canyon. In the year after he made that doomed attempt, I remember riding my Schwinn through the streets of Carmel, building little jumps with other children and playing a game that we simply called “Evel Knievel.” When I saw he died today, I had a sudden flashback to a time — nearly thirty-five years ago — when he was the hero of every kid in my school. I had a little plastic Evel Knievel motorcycle with a plastic action figure, and when I wasn’t building small wooden ramps out of particle board to do jumps on my bike, I was playing with that darned doll.

For someone who writes as much about masculinity as I do, it’s odd I don’t refer more often to the cultural icons of my childhood. Three public figures from the mid-’70s were, for me, the ultimate “men’s men”: O.J. Simpson, Evel Knievel, and the actor Tom Laughlin, who starred in The Trial of Billy Jack, an utterly forgettable film that was perhaps the first grown-up movie I saw in the theater (age eight). Another post for another time about these three very different men and their influence on a very young Hugo.

A note on not grieving Norman Mailer (or Ayn Rand, or Kahlil Gibran)

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 13, 2007
in Books, People and Poetry
. 28 Comments

More than is absolutely necessary, I don’t grieve Norman Mailer’s passing. Of all the acclaimed American writers of the second half of the last century, his popularity was the most inexplicable to me. I found Mailer’s prose dull, and perhaps for that reason, his nasty, angry, posturing sexism seemed all the more obvious and shopworn to me. I tried three times to read The Naked and the Dead, and never finished it. I know I’m not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but in Mailer’s case, yikes, it’s hard.

Mailer is in a very small group of writers whom I find so impossible that I get irked the moment I even hear their names. The two others who come to mind are, for different reasons, Ayn Rand and Kahlil Gibran. I’ve actually read the major works of Rand (she’s the only writer I’ve ever read who can both bore and enrage simultaneously), and I’ve struggled with the Prophet. I’ve done a few weddings with my mail-order minister’s license, and at one, I even had to read a long section from Gibran. I did so cheerfully and without complaint, but to hear those pretentious, gummy syllables fall from my lips was hard. (And I know a thing or two about being pretentious and gummy.) Anyhow, the best thing I’ve read all year is Alan Jacob’s delicious take on Gibran in First Things. It’s not entirely Christian in spirit, but it’s very fine, and if you’re familiar with the Prophet’s style, you’ll be howling. An excerpt:

O Book, O Collected Works of Kahlil Gibran,
Published by Everyman’s Library on a dark day,
I lift you from the Earth to which I recently flung you
When my wrath grew too mighty for me,
I lift you from the Earth,
Noticing once more your annoying heft,
And thanking God—though such thanks are sinful—
That Kahlil Gibran died in New York in 1931
At the age of forty-eight,
So that he could write no more words,
So that this Book would not be yet larger than it is.

So, folks, which writer much esteemed and beloved by your friends do you really, really dislike?

A quick Diana note

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 31, 2007
in Memories and People
. 1 Comment

I want to quickly note today’s tenth anniversary of the death of Diana. As I wrote last fall, Diana’s death remains — for me — the single most shocking public event of my lifetime, save for 9/11 itself. Here’s what I wrote last year:

As luck would have it, I flew into Manchester Airport on the very day Diana died — Sunday, August 31. I was traveling to a medieval history conference at Durham University, and had to drive the several hundred miles from Manchester to Durham in the pouring rain. It was my first experience of driving on the “wrong side” of the road, and to do so in a downpour, jet-lagged, while listening to the BBC coverage of the terrible accident and its aftermath was positively surreal. It was an amazing thing that my life didn’t also end on the same day that Diana’s did!

I was 14 when Diana and Charles married; six years younger than the Princess, I had an almost obligatory crush on her from the time their engagement was announced in February 1981. I was exactly the right age to be mesmerized by her. I followed her story for years and years, and like many, was saddened by the divorce. (The separation from Charles came in the Queen’s “annus horribilis” of 1992, the same year my first wife and I split up.) And I can say without question that if the 9/11 terrorist attacks are the single most shocking event of my lifetime, Diana’s death in that Paris tunnel ranks a close second. No shuttle explosion, no assassination attempt, no earthquake — no other historic happening is as vivid in my memory as those stunning days in 1997.

So in her honor, I’m listening to “I Vow to Thee My Country” and “Jerusalem” on my Itunes this morning. And while the theology of the former song is problematic, I confess I have no trouble singing along.